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Flou by Jason Freeman, with Andrew Beck, Xiang Cao, Mark Godfrey, Jagadeeswaran Jayaprakash, Al Matthews, Rachel Ponder, Alex Rae, and Sriram Viswanathan [Needs Java 1.5+; Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux; Minimum 768 MB RAM and 1.5 GHz processor; Fast graphics card; Speakers or headphones]

Flou (pronounced “flew”) is not exactly a game; you do fly a ship through space, but you cannot shoot anything, score points, or win or lose. The focus, rather, is on the soundtrack: as you navigate through a 3D world and zoom through objects in space, you add loops and apply effects to an ever-evolving musical mix. You can also design your own worlds to fly through and share them with other Flou users. Continue reading

Sonic Wargame at CTM.08 is open for participation. We are looking for musicians, DJ’s and gamers. It is also possible to apply as a team. A team should consist of a musician (or DJ) and a gamer. Any instrument or set-up with a line output is welcome. Each team should have 1 output and 1 input.

Sonic Wargame will be running for two days: On January 29 there will be 3 rounds with 4 different teams in each round - On January 30 there will be 2 rounds with the best teams of the previous day, plus a final round with the best 4 teams of all. Continue reading

Club Transmediale (the venue that traditionally hosts musical and audio-visual performances during the Transmediale festival), this year will be transformed, for some days, in an arena where valiant performers will fight using scratches, samples and effects. The battlefield will be Sonic Wargame, a quadraphonic installation made by the Dutch musician Xavier Van Wersch which allows four single players (or two teams of two players each) to compete under the supervision of a referee and the participation of the audience. The players, positioned at the corners of this installation, will be able to use a console and a speaker and, through a switch, to vote for the other players. Continue reading

I’ve been playing Lord of the Rings Online for a little while now, and while it has a few interesting twists on standard MMO design, one thing really stood out for me, the music creation system available to every player.

Players can learn to play an instrument starting at low levels and what this does is that when the player chooses to take out their instrument, the keyboard switches to a configuration where specific keys are mapped to specific notes. For instance, 1 is C, 1 + cntrl is C#, 1 + cntrl + alt = C# up one octave, etc. In this way very specific chords can be created. Continue reading

Adam Nash is a new media artist, composer, programmer, performer and writer. He works primarily in networked real-time 3D spaces, exploring them as live audiovisual performance spaces. His sound/composition and performance background strongly informs his approach to creating works for virtual environments, embracing sound, time and the user as elements equal in importance to vision. Adam’s work has been presented in galleries, festivals and online in Australia, Europe, Asia and the Americas, including SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Venice Biennale. He also works as composer and sound artist with “Company in Space” (AU) and “Igloo” (UK), exploring the integration of motion capture into real-time 3D audiovisual spaces. He is currently undertaking a Master of Arts by Research at the “Centre for Animation and Interactive Media” at RMIT University, Melbourne, researching multi-user 3D cyberspace as a live performance medium; and he’s a Lecturer in “Computer Games and Digital Art” in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University.

Adam will be answering reader’s questions in the comments section below until January 31, 2008. Continue reading

q3apd - by Steven Pickles and Julian Oliver - is an experimental work that takes the events and spatial dynamics of combat and uses this information to make live computer music. Continue reading

game mod from steph thirion on Vimeo. Continue reading

Frotzophone by Adam Parrish [at the ITP Winter Show and NIME @ Exit Art on December 13, 2007] - Maps, games, music: what do they have in common? Interactive fiction has its roots in maps: Will Crowther’s original Adventure was a faithful simulation of an actual cave in the Colossal Cave system. Some say that the entire genre consists of “interactive maps,” and mapping as a process often serves as the foundation for both designing and playing interactive fiction.

The Frotzophone hijacks a Z-Machine interpreter (a virtual machine originally designed in the 1980s for running interactive fiction on many platforms, and still used today) and extracts information relating to the map that the game is simulating. Continue reading

Gameshow The Game by The Present Tense :: November 2-4, 2007 :: Mobius, 725 Harrison Ave., Boston MA :: Live Show: November 2, 8 pm.

This will be a one hour performance of live sound mixing, video, and performative actions centered around a tapestry of game boards. As with past GCM performances, the audio is the central component of the performance, with video, installation and actions augmenting the sound. Our installation will remain in situ after our performance, with the video and a recording of the resulting live audio available for visitors to experience for the remainder of the show. Continue reading